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Cb419d882cd5bb5286069675b4 In this volume, Lave and Wenger undertake a radical and im- portant rethinking and reformulation of our conception of learning. By placing emphasis on the whole person, and by viewing agent, activity, and world as mutually constitutive, they give us the opportunity to escape from the tyranny of the assumption that learning is the reception of factual knowledge or information. The authors argue that most accounts of learn- ing have ignored its quintessentially social character. To make the crucial step away from a solely epistemological account of the person, they propose that learning is a process of partici- pation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engage- ment and complexity. Situated Learning Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives Senior Editor Emeritus JOHN SEELY BROWN, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center General Editors ROY PEA, Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences and Director, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Stanford University CHRISTIAN HEATH, The Management Centre, King's College, London LUCY A. SUCHMAN, Centre for Science Studies and Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication LUCY A. SUCHMAN The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in Schools DENIS NEWMAN, PEG GRIFFIN, and MICHAEL COLE Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation JEAN LAVE and ETIENNE WENGER Street Mathematics and School Mathematics TEREZINHA NUNES, DAVID WILLIAM CARRAHER, and ANALUCIA DIAS SCHLIEMANN Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context SETH CHAIKLIN and JEAN LAVE Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations GAVRIEL SALOMON The Computer As Medium PETER BOGH ANDERSEN, BERIT HOLMQVIST, and JENS F. JENSEN Sociocultural Studies of Mind JAMES V. WERTSCH, PABLO DEL RIO, and AMELIA ALVAREZ Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing LAURA M. W. MARTIN, KATHERINE NELSON, and ETHEL TOBACH Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner ETHEL TOBACH, RACHEL JOFFEE FALMAGNE, MARY BROWN PARLEE, LAURA M. W. MARTIN, and AGGIE SCRIBNER KAPELMAN Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work CHARLES M. KELLER and JANET DIXON KELLER Computation and Human Experience PHILIP E. AGRE Continued on page following the Index Situated Learning Legitimate Peripheral Participation JEAN LAVE ETIENNE WENGER CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521413084 © Cambridge University Press 1991 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 18th printing 2008 A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-41308-4 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-42374-8 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2008 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. It occurred to us at the same moment to dedicate this book to each other. We do so as a celebration of an extraordinarily happy collaboration, in which we experienced many of the things we were writing about. Contents Series Foreword page 11 Foreword by William F. Hanks 13 Acknowledgments 25 Legitimate Peripheral Participation 27 From apprenticeship to situated learning 32 From situated learning to legitimate peripheral participation 34 An analytic perspective on learning 37 With legitimate peripheral participation 39 The organization of this monograph 42 Practice, Person, Social World 45 Internalization of the cultural given 47 Participation in social practice 49 The person and identity in learning 52 The social world 54 Contents 3 Midwives, Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Nondrinking Alcoholics 59 The case of apprenticeship 62 Five studies of apprenticeship 65 The apprenticeship of Yucatec midwives 67 The apprenticeship of Vai and Gola tailors 69 The apprenticeship of naval quartermasters 73 The apprenticeship of meat cutters 76 The apprenticeship of nondrinking alcoholics 79 Apprenticeship and situated learning: A new agenda 84 4 Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice 89 Structuring resources for learning in practice 91 The place of knowledge: Participation, learning curricula, communities of practice 94 The problem of access: Transparency and sequestration 100 Discourse and practice 105 Motivation and identity: Effects of participation 110 Contradictions and change: Continuity and displacement 113 5 Conclusion 119 References 125 Index 131 10 Series Foreword The situated nature of learning, remembering, and understand- ing is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations, and that they use the tools and representational media that culture provides to support, ex- tendvand reorganize mental functioning. But cognitive theo- ries of knowledge representation and educational practice, in school and in the workplace, have not been sufficiently re- sponsive to questions about these relationships. And the need for responsiveness has become salient as computational media radically reshape the frontiers of individual and social action, and as educational achievement fails to translate into effective use of knowledge. This series is born of the conviction that new and exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are under way, as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to analyze and influence the new transformations of social and mental life, and to un- derstand successful learning wherever it occurs. Computational media include not only computers but the vast array of expressive, receptive, and presentational devices available for use with computers, including interactive video, optical media such as CD-ROM and CD-I, networks, hyper- 11 Series Foreword media systems, work-group collaboration tools, speech rec- ognition and synthesis, image processing and animation, and software more generally. These technologies are dramatically transforming the basic patterns of communication and knowledge interchange in so- cieties, and automating the component processes of thinking and problem solving. In changing situations of knowledge ac- quisition and use, the new interactive technologies redefine - in ways yet to be determined - what it means to know and understand, and what it means to become "literate" or an "educated citizen." The series invites contributions that advance our under- standing of these seminal issues. Roy Pea John Seely Brown 12 Foreword by William F. Hanks I first encountered these ideas in spring of 1990, when Jean Lave spoke at the Workshop on Linguistic Practice at the Uni- versity of Chicago. There were about a dozen of us, mostly working on problems in language use and interaction; mostly anthropologists, linguists, or hybrids; several with research commitments to a non-Western language. I had just completed a study of reference as a social practice, in which I analyzed Yucatec Maya language use in its linguistic, indexical, and cultural contexts (1990). One of the central issues being pur- sued in the workshop was the relation between context and literal meaning or, in somewhat more technical terms, the role of indexicality in semantics. Coming from this angle, Lave and Wenger's work was really exciting because it located learning squarely in the processes of coparticipation, not in the heads of individuals. The analogy to language was just below the surface, only occasionally made explicit during several hours of very fruitful discussion, and yet many of us felt that we had gained new insights into problems of language. We had al- ready been exploring speech as interaction, trying to take meaning production out of the heads of individual speakers and locate it in the fields of social interaction. The 1990 pre- sentation, and Jean Lave's ability to engage intellectually in 13 Foreword by William F. Hanks the issues it raised, provoked some of the best discussion we have enjoyed. My first reason for mentioning this background, then, is to say that this book, on which the speech was based, is very productive in the sense of setting forth a strong, pro- vocative position on issues that are of basic significance to practice theory quite generally, and not only to how practice grounds learning. The second reason is simply to underscore the fact that my remarks in this foreword come from a certain perspective, and are necessarily selective. Situated Learning contributes to a growing body of research in human sciences that explores the situated character of hu- man understanding and communication. It takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situations in which it occurs. Rather than defining it as the acquisition of propositional knowledge, Lave and Wenger situate learning in certain forms of social coparticipation. Rather than asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are in- volved, they ask what kinds
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